A good sturdy camera tripod, however excellent it may be for much indoor and some outdoor photography, is often seriously at a loss out-of-doors in rough terrain or when performing close-up or copy work indoors or out. When close-up nature photography especially is undertaken in wooded or overgrown country, it is difficult or impossible to maneuver the typical tripod so that it is both stabile and convenient to hand as well as sufficiently close to what is to be pictured. Even indoors, where there are no terrain problems, the usual tripod is too large and inflexible for close-up copy work of various kinds without special attachments for those purposes. One I know of amounts to little more than an addition to the tripod for lowering the camera. Another is a low, "spider-like" stand with three or four legs. But more to the point is the one shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,586,278. This, however, consists of a rather elaborate and cumbersome array of legs and interconnected rods, all not readily assembled or disassembled for transport or storage besides being not really suitable for much inside or outside work. For some nature photography especially it would doubtless take too long to set up before the "subject" would have vanished. Probably it would be too noisy as well, for silence is one of the requisites of nature photography in those cases. At any rate, until my present invention, I am aware of no camera support system specifically addressed to the problems concerned, one which is particularly adapted to indoor and outdoor close-up and copy photography, which is also useful for general photography, and which at the same time is light in weight, silent, flexible and compact.